Boston
Small Press and Poetry Scene has been reviewing books since 2004. The
site was founded in 2004 by Doug
Holder. It is dedicated to reviewing books of poetry, non-fiction, fiction,
as well as featuring interviews of poets and writers. Mignon Ariel King, a talented
Editor, Writer, Poet and Publisher (Tell-Tale
Chapbooks) sunk her teeth into Grand Slams and her review left no room for
dessert.
The first thing one notices in Timothy Gager's Grand Slam: A Coming of
Eggs Story is the Holden Caulfield-like anti-hero protagonist Woody.
There is an ensemble of characters in the novel who make up the staff and
management at a chain diner, Grand Slams, and Gager deftly weaves their
backstories and inner lives into the fast-paced narrative. Despite the
often more bizarre and troubled manifestations of the other diner workers'
lives, Woody is clearly the focal character. Woody is a young almost-man
who is emotionally distressed and unfocused. He is in an emotional and
social limbo a year post high school, and still living with his parents, yet he
is focused enough to seek and find work over the summer break from
college. The two characters who are also Woody's age are working their
part-time diner gigs around college schedules, would-be college schedules, and
pre-career funks. It is unclear at times whether the trio have any clear
plans. They do, however, have dreams and passions, the passions often misdirected.
Of the three, Woody is the most attuned to what is going on around him, very
invested in how other people's lives are turning out, whereas Sugar and Bobby
are just going through the motions, enduring their surroundings and coworkers.
Woody's mother (Mrs. Geyser) attempts to monitor and guide; his father, a
political progressive who named his son after Woodrow Wilson, grumpily tunes
out his family to focus on favorite television shows. A comparison is
drawn between Woody's father and his "work mother," Maura.
Maura is fifty-something and seems plunked in the diner with her crumply
stockings and middle-aged wide middle; Woody's father is plunked in his living
room in a Michelin man body. It is no wonder that the Grand Slams "work
family" is so dysfunctional with Maura as its matriarch. She keeps
things moving, but she emotionally detaches from everyone at work to go home to
nobody after she picks up her check each week. Maura left her daughter
behind for a better life...perhaps, but really her life is only simpler,
uncluttered by the needs of others. She has no suitors, no girlfriends,
just her job and subtle dreams of making more, having more, materialistically
speaking.
Most of the low-level workers in the diner are more invested than their
superiors. Keating, a nasty bastard of a boss, does as little as possible
while screaming at his employees, most notably emotionally abusive toward Kayak
Kenny, a developmentally challenged bus boy who fantasizes about buying a
canoe. Kenny believes girls will fall in love with him if he has a canoe,
swept up in the romance of floating on the pond with him. Keating floats
on cocaine and a rather sleazy sex life. He sweeps women off their feet
with the lure of free drugs. Sugar is the diner's beauty; she is lusted
after by every man who comes within reach of her pretty, pony-tailed, short
skirt- and cowboy-booted beauty. More power to the male author who makes
Sugar one of the most intelligent, focused, compassionate characters in the
book. Her flaw is pathologically bad taste in men. She has a small
life and thinks small, but she evolves and matures faster than her
age-appropriate male interests. Sugar's introspection leads her away from
the sweaty, portly, mustard-stained tie and rumpled suit grasp of
Keating. Her next conquest is a socioeconomic upgrade, Sayid, an Egyptian
man who is too sexually repressed (for religious reasons) to use Sugar as a sex
object. He courts her, and this is obviously something to which she is
unaccustomed but which she grows to realize she deserves. Meanwhile,
Woody pines for her from afar, as he did in high school, while being her
platonic friend.
There are standard types throughout the narrative. Marisimo, the
half-blind ex-boxer with cauliflowered ears, is less than fluent in English and
over invested in his dishwasher job. Dyed-haired Bob, the transplanted
new boss, could not care less about anyone who works for him; he re=trains the
staff with an iron fist. Woody resists the ridiculous, superficial
changes in a hilarious sequence of passive-aggressive actions, such as hiding
the clip-on bowties. Even the chilly Maura begins to warm up to coworkers
as her career waitressing is challenged by the new regime. She at least
is proud of her work and her 20-plus years' commitment as the company
girl. The last romantic hope she had divorced then paired up again
without noticing Maura's romantic hopes for him. Maura is a bridge
between the detached elders, with their selfishness, rigor, and paternalistic
actions only in the condescending sense, not in any way caring about role
modeling for or promotion of the Grand Slams staff. The three young
characters are not slammed over the head of the reader, and Gager manages to
use character typecasting without making the characters seem wooden, stiff
props in the narrative. In fact, the characters are so realistic, and
subtly nuanced with uncharacteristic personality traits as well as those
expected, that the reader is frustrated by wanting to hug or slap them.
Throughout the novel, the almost-adults keep the momentum going in the midst of
the socially odd and borderline tragic, invested adults. How will this
trio grow up while surrounded by infantile, base, or simply lost adults?
The reader is invested by the third chapter in finding out.
